Zeus’ flagship feature was its checklist. The checklist was an itemized form of everything that was shipping that week. Customers could fill out the form and notify the store which items they wanted to pick up on Wednesday (when comics book typically arrive). And as far as I could tell, Zeus was the first store to offer this feature. I’ve seen some crop up here that there, but they were largely static, cumbersome to use, and were constructed out of tables.

Three things: customers noted that it wasn’t the greatest for mobile devices, and a digital comic publisher had a mobile app that customers were using in lieu of our checklist, and most importantly customers couldn’t tell which comic book they wanted by name alone. Often they would have to go to the store and pick up other titles they missed.

We’ll do it live!

While I’m already building a long list of bugs (bandwidth being a whopper), I certainly like the results so far. It’s already in my opinion a better solution than a the iPhone app offered (which wasn’t even usable on iOS4 for several weeks) and future updated to the web app will hopefully offer customers an optimal process in shopping with Zeus Comics.

Last summer, I had the opportunity to work with Eisner Award winning cartoonist Scott Kurtz of PVP. During one conversation we had, he came up with a punch-line to what we were talking about. I don’t remember what the subject was, but the punch-line involved a mock editorial cartoon. He grabbed a 2″ x 2″ sticky note pad and drew the cartoon. We had a laugh.

This would never happen online. At least, not in any convenient, simple, method that I was aware of.

Right now, it’s very crude. The controls are, admittedly, non-intuitive. There is no ‘Undo’ other than clearing the canvas and starting over. It doesn’t support older browsers either.

I’m actually quite okay with that last part. This site was immensely fun to build. Getting it to work on IE6 would have taken away from that. Right now, I know that it works on FireFox 3.0, Safari 4.0b (or WebKit nightly build), and Google Chrome 2.0.

Zeus Comics and Collectibles is an award-winning comic book retail store in Dallas, Texas. For almost nine years, Zeus has been serving the needs of the comic book reading community in the DFW area in the only manner one can expect from a locally gay-owned business – fabulously!

Since its last redesign, when Zeus won the Will Eisner Spirit of Comics Retailing Award in 2006, design trends evolved, and how we organize and display our code has matured. Zeus went through many attempts at integrating its point-of-sale system with an ecommerce solution. I’m embarrassed to admit, its first version, not having any experience in ecommerce (how hard could it be?) used FileMaker Pro and Lasso. Looking back, I’m stunned by some on my coding and design decisions. Some of which locked the site into arcane structures from which are not easily broken. And some still exist.

The old method for adding something to the site was simple—make a new folder and add some new tables and call it good. Want a forum? Install Aterr. Want a checklist? Add a new CodeIgniter folder. After all, what’s one more, right? After a while, we ended up with many little systems and no way to support them all.

The site’s design needed consistency from its previous version as well. Too dramatic a departure and it loses its branding. We weren’t looking for a fresh start, just a face lift (with enough skin for more adjusting later).

Our approach to ecommerce was simple: always be closing. One of the lessons learned from out previous cart solution was the more steps a customer has to take to complete an order, the more likely we’d lose the sale. When you go into a retail store to buy a comic, you don’t expect to be a member of that shop. When was the last time you walked up to a counter to pay for your goods to have the clerk ask for you username and password. I don’t have a user name. I just want to buy this book.

This was how our previous cart worked. And I’ll say this first, after trying out X-cart, Zen Cart, Squirrel Cart and later Magento Commerce, Shop Script was the only solution with the simplest way for us to control data from our point-of-sale source. After adding all the items to the cart, the user would have to create an account, add records to the address book for both shipping and billing, choose those records and add them to the order, and then they could finalize their purchase.

In the current system, we’ve taken out the need for membership. We don’t need it. We don’t really want it. We certainly don’t want to support it, if a customer forgets their password. Instead, customers get a tracking key upon return from Paypal. We don’t want your credit card info either.

In the next few weeks, I hope to have a downloadable version of the ecommerce solution, so stay tuned.

Is zeuscomics.com all done now? Hardly. Out of the gate, I’m already tracking new errors plus some old ones that will be address by the next release. Fortunately, one of the design/coding goals was to be able to change and grow the site as needed. Stay tuned for that too.

http://www.zeuscomics.com